I moved from being an entrepreneur to teaching entrepreneurship at U.C. Berkeley, Stanford University, Columbia University and Caltech after 21 years in 8 high-tech startups. My book The Four Steps to the Epiphany launched the Lean Startup movement. My follow up book The Startup Owner’s Manual, is the standard text for entrepreneurship. In 2011, the National Science Foundation adopted my Lean LaunchPad course as the curriculum to commercialize science in the United States.

The Future Of Translational Medicine -- Lessons Learned In Diagnostics

This post is part of our series on the National Science Foundation I-Corps Lean LaunchPad class in Life Science and Health Care at UCSF. Doctors, researchers and Principal Investigators in this class got out of the lab and hospital talked to 2,355 customers, tested 947 hypotheses and invalidated 423 of them. The class had 1,145 engagements with instructors and mentors. (We kept track of all this data by instrumenting the teams with LaunchPad Central software.)

Multiple Sclerosis - MSMultiple Sclerosis – MS – is an immune system disease that attacks the myelin, the fatty sheath that surrounds and protects nerve fibers of the central nervous system (brain, spinal cord, and optic nerve). T-cells, (a type of white blood cell in the immune system,) become sensitized to myelin and cross the blood-brain barrier into the central nervous system (CNS). Once in the CNS, these T-cells injure myelin, and secrete chemicals that damage nerve fibers (axons) and recruit more damaging immune cells to the site of inflammation.

There are currently ten FDA approved MS medications for use in relapsing forms of MS. None of these drugs is a cure, and no drug is approved to treat the type of MS that shows steady progression at onset. MS disease management decisions are complex and requires a patients neurologist to figure out what drugs to use.

Mira Medicine And Multiple SclerosisThe team came to class with the thought of commercializing the UCSF Multiple Sclerosis BioScreen Project a Precision Medicine application that integrates a patients medical records with the latest population-based data from hundreds of other Multiple Sclerosis patients, (including their 3D MRI scans,) and using predictive algorithms makes it possible to chart a unique course of treatment for each patient. (Mira Medicine team member Pierre-Antoine Gourraud was the project co-leader.)

Mira wanted to commercialize the UCSF Multiple Sclerosis Bioscreen project and to add additional neurological diseases which require multiple types of data (including biomarkers, clinical, and imaging). They wanted to help medical centers and large providers assess disease progression to guide therapeutic decision-making. Over the course of the class Mira Medicine team spoke to over 80 customers, partners and payers.

Then reality hit. First, the team found that their Multiple Sclerosis Bioscreen application (which they used as their MVP) was just a “nice-to-have”, not a “must-have”. In fact, the “must have features” were their future predictive algorithms. Next, they found that if their tool can enable a diagnosis, (even without claiming it could) then it was likely that the FDA would require a 510(k) medical device clearance. Then they found to get reimbursed they need a CPT code (and they had to decide whether to code stack - using multiple codes for “one” diagnosis, and thereby getting multiple reimbursements for one test. (The rules have changed so that code stacking is hard or impossible), Or get a new CPT code, or use miscellaneous code.) To get a new CPT and a 510(k) they would have to perform a some sort of clinical study. At a minimum a 1-year prospective study (a study to see if the neurologists using the application had patients with a better outcome then those who didn’t have access to the app). Getting approval to use an existing (aka old) CPT code means showing equivalence to an existing dx process or test, and the requirements are code-specific. Finally, to get access to data sources of other MS patients they would need to have HIPPA Business Associate Agreement.

Watch their Lessons Learned video below and find out how they pivoted and what happened.

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